Secure Communication of an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV)

Abstract

The data transmitted from the Ground Control Station (GCS) to the Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) is very repetitive and insecure and it is vulnerable to Man in middle attacks and spoofing. Our aim was to make this link secure by using state of the art algorithms and techniques. We used one time pad technique to encrypt our data and then used hamming code to cater for any errors while data is transmitted. The main challenge we faced during implementation of one time pad technique was to synchronize the system. Synchronization means that to encrypt data we need a pad from a pool of data and for decryption we need same pad. So this issue was resolved using a seed value which keeps on changing during the entire transmission of data and this seed value is fed to encoder as well as decoder. We received data from computer for encryption. We synchronized clock of FPGA which works at the rate of 50 mega hertz and rate at which computer sends data at 115200 bits per second. We have written code in verilog and simulated it. Simulation results were according to our expectations and then we burnt this code on FPGA and verified it. On the receiver end we displayed results on a map on which a UAV is simulated as acting according to the commands issued by ground control station. On receiver we controlled navigation of UAV, speed, fuel etc through our ground control station which is transmitter in this case.